'Amadeus' at Oak Park Festival Theatre ★★★

Kerry Reid, Special to the Tribune

If Antonio Salieri has living descendants, one imagines them pinballing between frustration and gratitude when considering Peter Shaffer's 1979 play "Amadeus," in which the court composer for Austrian Emperor Joseph II plays the most operatically envious man in Western drama since Iago.

Shaffer's version of Salieri and Mozart's rivalry is almost entirely fictionalized, but it sparked an interest in both Salieri's real biography and his long-neglected music, particularly once F. Murray Abraham won the Oscar as the spiteful nemesis in Milos Forman's 1984 film version.

Despite the title, the play lives and dies on the strength of whoever tackles the role of Shaffer's Italian-born glittering mediocrity, who finds favor in the "city of slander" of 18th-century Vienna but loses his soul once the young genius of Salzburg arrives. Salieri virtually never leaves the stage, and he serves as our narrator and tour guide, albeit one whose reliability is often in question.

Fortunately, Kevin Theis in Oak Park Festival Theatre's "Amadeus," in a sturdy if occasionally stolid revival under Mark Richard's direction, makes the multiple challenges of playing Salieri look as easy as Shaffer's "Wolfie" dashing off an opera.

From long self-aware expositional passages to scheming comic interludes with the puffed-up stooges who control court life, Theis fully inhabits the role without resorting to the sort of gimcrackery that mars his character's musical output.

This is particularly true in the first act's hair-raising curtain closer, when Salieri examines copies of Mozart's compositions brought to him by Constanze (Meg Warner), Wolfie's wife who desperately wants the older man to help her husband gain a well-compensated position in Joseph II's court. Theis' Salieri shifts from the planned seduction of his rival's wife to a man stripped naked by awareness of his own inadequacies, and who decides that his real beef isn't with Mozart but with an Almighty who would reward the giggling man-child with unimaginable gifts denied to the conformist composer. The younger artist simply must be collateral damage in Salieri's war with God.

It's a hypnotic and gutting scene, enhanced by Theis' pinpoint articulation and control of his vocal and physical instrument, even as his character is reeling toward an existential abyss. (Could someone please cast Theis in a stage version of Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser," about a classmate of Glenn Gould's facing similar travails in the face of genius?)

The rest of the cast in Richard's production deliver perfectly adequate turns in their roles, but they (and Daniel Carlyon's music-drenched sound design) occasionally feel lost in the vast green splendor of Austin Gardens, which also overpowers Joe Schermoly's stripped-down take on Habsburgian excess in the set.

Chris Daley's Mozart charms in his early devil-may-care mode but isn't quite as convincing at delivering the broken-down desperation of the second act. His interludes with Warner's Constanze and the capricious emperor (Jonathan Nicols, who occasionally seems to be channeling Martin Short) are quite delicious, however, and one suspects that all the performances will become stronger as the performers adjust to the challenging venue. Meantime, Theis is a reason unto himself to make the trip.